Meldrick Adrian B. Cheng
Makati Hope Christian School Should We Still Hope For Hope?
When it seemed I can’t think of writing anything, that’s when I decided to try writing something different –HOPE. I wrote a list of things that I hoped for. After finishing 17 items on my list, I felt a new sense of enthusiasm. It surprised me that after being so frustrated and fatigued, I was able to completely change my mood. After writing around 6 more items to my list, I realized why it was difficult for me to write this. It is because hope is more than just a term we see from self-help books or from inspirational movies. Hope is a psychological need to believe. Hope is wanting something happen. Hope is such a complex feeling that describing it in words is a tremendous task by itself. Everyone has his own opinion on hope. Mine is based on a metaphor by Brendon Burchard that says “The power plant doesn’t have energy, it transforms and generates it.” Hope is not something we lose one day and gain the other. Hope is something we ourselves create. Our actions and thoughts affect our attitude and this is what feeds our emotions. When we act negatively, we create sadness. When we are losing hope, we need our thoughts and our actions to “feed” us hope. The best person to give or share us hope is oneself. During the summer of 2012, when we least expected it, my father was diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer. It came as a shock to my entire family since our family had no history of cancer and my father was still young. It was during these moments when I truly understood what the phrase “I couldn’t believe it” truly meant. Around a week after the diagnosis, I left for China where I had enrolled in a summer program. During the first few days of my stay there, I felt a sense of sadness that I still cannot comprehend until now, being away from my loved ones who were experiencing troubles while I was in a completely new area by myself. The only thing that kept me going throughout the first few weeks was receiving updates from my family in the Philippines when we were finally allowed to use our phones. These messages gave me hope that someday things would get better. I must admit some days I had feared of coming back to my dorm one night and receiving a message saying ‘the operation failed”, but luckily that never happened. That’s the strange thing about hope, even though we are surrounded by all these negative emotions, or when we are in a really difficult situation, it never truly disappears. There are times when we think all hope is lost, but when go on with our lives, that is already hope. Going on with your life amidst all the tragedy you’ve experienced means that you think there are still more important things to live for and that happiness is not far away. With disasters and calamites becoming a norm, especially here in our country, it’s hard to figure out how all these people who were affected by such events manage to wake up every day and go on with their lives. These are people who lost everything they have, people who will never be able to talk to their loved ones ever again. How do they find the strength to move on? They do it by accepting the facts and persevering. When something bad happens to us, we can’t just sit down all day and drown
in self pity. This is not going to bring closer to what we truly want to achieve. Sometimes hoping itself is not good enough. We have to do things that will lead us toward our goal. When most people hear the term hope, they usually think it’s just a term that life coaches us to convince people to consult them, but it is actually more than that. Hope is a fundamental part in everyone’s life. The hard part is how do we spread and maintain hope. Hope is something we are supposed to “generate” by ourselves through our actions and our thoughts. Hope is something we never truly lose and need to go on living. Hope is often not enough to get something we want. We need to be patient and persevere through hard times. Hope is not something we should wish for, hope is always with us. All we need to do is learn how to find it and be driven by it.